LESLEY DUMBRELL

Including paintings, works on paper and the artist’s recent foray into sculpture, Lesley Dumbrell: Thrum presents over 90 works drawn from major Australian public and private collections, in a selection that ranges from the experimental and unfinished to the highly realised and refined. Alongside the exuberant _Spangle _1977 and _Solstice _1974, a visitor favourite in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ collection, the exhibition features landmark paintings including Foehn 1975 and _Tramontana _1984, and early-career works such as _Red shift _1968 and _Promontories _1969.

Starting in 1969 with hard-edge and optical paintings, the exhibition reveals Dumbrell’s development as an assured and ambitious painter with a distinctive voice. Her perennial fascination with colour relationships and the organising power of the grid has seen these elements become potent vehicles for her expression of experience and emotion, sensation and place. Now in her eighties, Dumbrell continues to explore colour and form, with laser-cut metal sculptures the latest advance in a practice characterised by intuition, experimentation and play.